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Rehabilitating a reputation is part of the cycle of pro sports, where practitioners are regularly laid low, sometimes by their own doing, and out of that rise-fall arc come stories of knockout punches and Lazarus returns. Or, as in the case of the past couple of days:

Score a bunch of goals and you’re back in the club.

Stomp on someone and it’s a red card, opprobrium, red-faced apologies and a pending exile to soccer’s New World.

As for an accused sexual offender, that’s a toughie — fighting relegation, or not?

Barcelona’s Luis Suarez, the scorer in the pack, is being lauded of late for his winner that slayed Spanish rival Real Madrid in the latest installment of El Clasico. It was an exquisite example of el toque, as it’s called in his native Uruguay — “the touch” — and it amounted to the three seconds or so everyone is going to remember from a subpar Clasico long on the usual swooning histrionics and Mascherano’ing but short on the sustained brilliance such superpower encounters regularly feature. The well-timed run, the deadening take of a 40-metre long bomb in stride, and the tight far-post finish was exactly the kind of quality Barca paid for last summer when they took Suarez off the hands of Liverpool in the wake of his chomp on Giorgio Chiellini’s shoulder.

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It’s been some road back since. The suspension for biting delayed his Nou Camp debut until the end of October. There’s been trouble fitting a harness around him among Barca’s three-headed South American attacking force capacious enough to also accommodate Argentine Lionel Messi’s ranging ways and Brazilian Neymar’s runs and addiction to bad haircuts. Now Suarez is back, and at the point of this potent spear that is not your Pep’s Barca, built around the direct lethality of those three forwards rather than their former soft-shoe tippy-tappy possession and olés. Sunday’s takedown of Real ran them to 18 wins in 19 games since they nearly imploded at the turn of the New Year. Now no one would bet serious money against them taking not just this La Liga title race of which they’re now in firm control, but also the domestic Copa Del Rey and the biggest corn roast of ’em all, the Champions League, with favoured Bayern Munich under their former manager Pep Guiardiola facing up to a fresh injury to Arjen Robben.

Some Liverpool fans were likely watching and remembering a little wistfully the old days of just a year ago when Suarez was banging in goals for them, instead of fading captain Steven Gerrard’s rush of blood to the head Sunday against their own classic rivals Manchester United. Gerrard is readying his move to the MLS’s Los Angeles Galaxy, and commemorative stamps are made of such careers as he’s had on Merseyside. Just not so literally. Or so fast, his appearance as a post-halftime substitute culminating in less than a minute in a left-footed trodding of Ander Herrera just made for a Yakety Sax soundtrack and Stevie Flee headlines, and perhaps hastening a hat-passing to buy him passage out of town early. More likely, as long as they’re still chasing that final top-four Champions League spot, now five points off, and the riches that go with, it’ll mean nothing more than a few forlorn garage-time minutes from his manager — because how does Brendan Rodgers trust him after that?

Still, in this world where the trains shuttle passengers like Suarez and Gerrard back and forth between a hero’s station and terminus villainous, there’s always room for one more. Sunderland’s Gus Poyet, whose big January move was signing former Toronto FC washout Jermain Defoe, was recently fired as the hapless northern club dropped to the edge of perdition, otherwise known as relegation to the second-tier Championship. Dutchman Dick Advocaat’s first move was to bring back midfielder Adam Johnson from a club-imposed suspension imposed earlier this month, when Johnson was arrested for allegedly having sex with an underage girl. Desperate times, desperate measures, right?

Real life is not so forgiving, but also not so stark. In pro sports’ unique world, redemption and infamy can be just a toque away.

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